Virtual KinoEye: Kinetic Camera, Machinima, and Virtual
Subjectivity in Second Life

Lori Landay

I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as
only I can see it. . . . free of the limits of time and space, I put together
any given points in the universe . . . . My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world.1

With
this invocation of "kino-eye", Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov imagined the
possibilities of cinema, some of which he was able to actualize in his film Man with a Movie Camera (1929), but his
words have fresh meaning in light of the new ways of seeing and being in
virtual worlds. In virtual worlds
like Second Life, the kinetic camera freed from the limitations of the human
body is realized in a manner beyond even Vertov's wildest imaginings. This creates great possibilities for
machinima—movies made within the 3-D graphical environment of a video
game or virtual world—but also the 3-D synthetic camera function in
Second Life can be used as a way of experiencing the virtual world that creates
a new kind of subjectivity, constructed through the point of view of a virtual
kino-eye.

Second
Life
is a virtual world owned by a company called Linden Lab, in which all content
is created by the "residents" who are represented by avatars. (For a 3-minute overview of Second Life, see my Machinima:
What is Second Life?.) It is of interest to people in the
media studies fields for a range of reasons, including the possibilities for
making and sharing machinima within it, its potential as a form of interactive
and immersive new media, and its prospects for education, art, music, and
social media. In particular,
if we think of a virtual world as a new form of participatory media in which
what I am terming the "virtual kino-eye" is not only a tool for digital video
making, but also the way in which one experiences the virtual world and
constructs subjectivity, it becomes very interesting to those interested in the
continuum of theoretical issues from spectatorship to participatory media.

MACHINIMA & VIRTUAL KINO-EYE

Machinima,
digital video captured in a virtual world like Second Life, is a kind of
animation. The word "machinima" combines
cinema and machine, and was first used in 2000 to describe the video capture of
realtime 3d action in a virtual environment that originated with
first-person-shooter video games like Doom and Quake in the 1990s. What had origins with hackers in the
demo scene in the late 1970s and into the 80s and went more mainstream as a way
of documenting how fast someone could finish a level quickly evolved into a
medium for storytelling, and the game environment became the set for virtual
filmmaking.2 For people who play games, machinima is
a way to participate in those worlds in an even more active way, going far
beyond the experience of playing to becoming a creator within that framework,
and often subverting it. From its very first episode (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BAM9fgV-ts and, be warned, there is strong
language), the hilarious Red vs Blue machinima questions the very basis of the
game Halo within which it is made. In an insightful essay, Robert Jones connects the kind of interaction
that machinimists have within games to Huizinga's "magic circle" of
game-playing and game design scholars Salen and Zimmerman's concept of
"transformative play," extending ideas raised by Henry Jenkins and others about
fan culture, transmedia, and participatory media into the arena of interactive
forms of media like games in his consideration of whether the
professionalization of machinima-making means the loss of the inside-out gamer
approach as the emphasis switches to storytelling instead of transformative
play. I would like to suggest a
third alternative to Jones' dichotomy, that represented by virtual subjectivity
constructed through kino-eye; it is possible that in making machinima within a
virtual world, storytelling is inseparable from transformative play because the
very act of seeing as and with a camera in the virtual world can be
transformative.

The
machinima I make is "filmed," or more accurately, captured, in Second Life, a
virtual world created entirely by the "residents." It is not a game--although
people can and do play games within it, and perhaps here a definition of a
virtual world will help: "A synchronous, persistent network of people, represented as avatars,
facilitated by networked computers."3 In Second Life, the possibilities
for machinima are dazzling and almost limitless. Because people can build whatever environment they want,
either themselves or by hiring talented artists, machinima can be made on
almost any set someone can imagine. I set up shots on my land or in spaces owned by my friends, often
building sets or adding props and set design, creating animations for avatars
to perform specific actions, depending on the project. There are limits as to what
avatars can do in terms of acting, but that is bound to develop quickly, once
there is a greater range of facial expressions.4 Despite the limitations, in a
sense, the machinamist has the most powerful crane/dolly/zoom/aerial shot
package one can imagine, and the machinima I have made that accompany this
essay try to demonstrate that.5

One could even see the kinetic quality
of the synthetic camera function in Second Life as an answer to Vertov's dream
of the kino-eye's exhilarating separation from the limitations of the
body. In his writing, Vertov
imagines the "I" of the kino-eye, bragging and delighting in its joyous nimble
freedom:

Now and forever, I free myself from
human immobility, I am in constant motion, I draw near, then away from objects,
I crawl under, I climb onto them. I move apace with the muzzle of a galloping horse, I pluge full speed
into a crowd, I outstrip running soldiers, I fall on my back, I ascend with an
airplane, I plunge and soar together with plunging and soaring bodies. Now I, a camera, fling myself along
their resultant, maneuvering in the the chaos of movement, recording movement,
starting with movements composed of the most complex combination.

In his film, Man With a
Movie Camera, as many film historians have noted, Vertov employs a dazzling
array of film techniques that do indeed demonstrate the possibilities of camera
and montage to create a new experience of perspective, subjectivity, mobility,
and modernity. Lev Manovich
connects Vertov's enthusiastic use of everything available to him to a larger
argument about database and narrative, and ultimately navigable virtual
space. Manovich considers why
Vertov's film is more than just a catalogue of effects, why "in the hands of
Vertov, they acquire meaning"

Because
in Vertov's film they are motivated by a particular argument, which is that the
new techniques of obtaining images and manipulating them, summed up by Vertov
in his term "kino-eye," can be
used to decode the world. As the
film progresses, straight footage gives way to manipulated footage; newer
techniques appear one after another, reaching a roller-coaster intensity by the
film's end—a true orgy of cinematography. It is as though Vertov restages his discovery of the
kino-eye for us, and along with him, we gradually realize the full range of
possibilities offered by the camera. Vertov's goal is to seduce us into his way
of seeing and thinking, to make us share his excitement, as he discovers a new
language for film. This gradual process
of discovery is film's main narrative, and it is told through a catalog of
discoveries. Thus is the hands of
Vertov, the database, this normally static and "objective" form, becomes
dynamic and subjective. More
important, Vertov is able to achieve something that new media designers and
artists still have yet to learn—how to merge database and narrative into
a new form. (243)

In Manovich's reading of Man
with a Movie Camera, we learn to see with the kino-eye because Vertov
models it for us, and in so doing, shows us a new way of seeing information
(the database) because we move through it. Later Manovich concludes his discussion of the forms of
database and navigable virtual space by returning to Vertov because Vertov
"wanted to overcome the limits of human vision and human movement through space
to arrive at more efficient means of data access. . . . Thus Vertov stands halfway between Baudelaire's flâneur and today's computer user: No
longer just a pedestrian walking down a street, but not yet [William] Gibson's
data cowboy who zooms through pure data armed with data-mining algorithms" (275, emphasis in original).

In my argument, Vertov's kino-eye is made manifest as a metaphor
in Second Life. In the interface
of the virtual world of Second Life, the spectator-gamer, through his or her
avatar, does not leap to the position of the data cowboy exactly, but employs
the virtual kino-eye as an eye, and as a camera. The virtual kino-eye, as Vertov so enthusiastically meant
it, as a new way of seeing, of creating perspective, of experience, is made possible
by the technology of the synthetic camera that moves along the x, y, and z axes
within the virtual space, remote from both the physical and virtual bodies of
its operator, yet closely, intimately connected to his or her perspective. The kino-eye is how virtual
subjectivity is constituted in a virtual world, and is the lens through which
experiences like telepresence, avatar identity, building objects, places, or
art in the virtual world, and social interactions occur. For the machinimatographer, using the
kino-eye, the virtual world is his or her location, set design, lighting, and
camera combined, and the only limits are of the imagination.

Figure 1: L1's scripted eye object gazes back at the
camera. Screen shot from Second
Life.

In
another sense, though, and this is really the essence of this argument here, it
is through this kinetic camera, this virtual kino-eye, that virtual
subjectivity is created, and this is how we experience a virtual world in which
everything is mutable and fleeting. The digital nature of the virtual world is mutable—that is one of
its appeals, of course, that it, one's avatar, one's land, can be so easily
bent to the will, customized and constantly evolved, but it means that nothing
is ever the same for long. With so
much mutability, what would it mean to last? When our very point of view is so unmoored physically, no
longer rooted in the body, but free to range far from the avatar, zoom out into
space, or in on a leaf, where is the center? Where is home? What is self? It is no
wonder that impermanence, ephemerality, and transformation are common themes in
virtual art.

How
these philosophical questions arise from the practices of using the camera
function are part of the fascination of the virtual world for me; metaphors can
easily be made manifest, and then interacted with, played with. For example, I made a kino-eye object
in Second Life to show where my camera camera position is,
or where I am looking as I "cam around," so I could illustrate how virtual
subjectivity can be created discursively through the literal and metaphorical
point of view of the kinetic inworld camera in one of my early machinimas,
"Avatar with a Kino-Eye." [See Machinima: "Avatar With a Kino Eye"].

The
concept of the virtual kino-eye made manifest in the object of the kino-eye is
informed, for me, as its creator and as I interact with it in the virtual
world, by theories of perception, spectatorship and the gaze developed by
scholars from Hugo Mustenberg, Christian Metz, and Anne Friedberg to Vivian Sobchack, and particularly
Francesco Casetti's Inside the Gaze: The
Fiction Film and Its Spectator. It is beyond the scope of this piece to
explore this subject fully, but one aspect of Casetti's argument delineates the
taboo against the "direct look into the camera and other forms of
interpellation" (25), which he defines as the "recognition by the film of
someone outside the text to whom the film makes a direct appeal" (138). The default cam position of Second Life
is behind the avatar's head; you can choose other spectator positions,
including a first-person point of view through the avatar's eyes.

Akin
to and more than Anne Friedberg's "mobilized virtual gaze . . . in an imaginary
flanerie through an imaginary elsewhere and elsewhen" (Window Shopping, 2), the
kinetic possibilities of the virtual kino-eye zoom, fly, race, spin, dance
along with Vertov's most utopian hopes for cinema and the new world it would
create. My experience making and
interacting with the object of the kino-eye illustrates how the virtual
kino-eye is not only a tool with which to make machinima, but also a practice
through which subjectivity can be constructed in a virtual world. It can be seen as a parable of how
kinetic, "alive," and social seeing and creating can be in a virtual
world. The object itself
plays off of a Magritte image from The
False Mirror (1928) to refer to Magritte's visual questioning of
subjectivity, mimesis, and spectatorship. The eye uses a programming language to control it with a script written
in Linden Scripting Language (LSL), which is how objects and avatars are made
to do things in SL, from doors swinging open when clicked on them, to particles
spewing from an object in a certain color and pattern, to triggering an
animation in a pose ball, or even objects that interact with the SL "wind" or
other aspects of the physics engine. Writing the script so the object would follow the camera position was
too advanced for a beginning scripter like me, so I asked the teacher of the
scripting classes I was taking, Simon Kline, for help. When I dropped his script into my eye
object, it worked, and I was thrilled. Later, when I logged back in, I started to cam around as usual. Something flitted by in my peripheral
vision on my screen. Then
again. I finally caught sight of
it, and realized it was my kino-eye, and that I didn't know how to stop it once
I had started it. I sent my
teacher a message asking for advice, and forgot about it, until I logged in
again to be surprised by the eye, still there.

The
idea of an object that was not under my control was funny, entertaining to move
by manipulating my camera, and giving me good ideas for stories for
machinima. My gaze, long a
fascination of course, was literally a toy, all the better for being a tricky
one. I showed it to friends, asked
them to "catch it." When I sent my
teacher Simon a message, I didn't use L1's account, but the alternate avatar I
use to shoot machinima, who I named Kino-Eye. "This is the eye. I am on the loose. L1 cannot control me!" Hilarious stuff, messages back and
forth. He gave me a new script
with a command in it for "desist," and now I can start and stop it as I wish,
but the ludic possibilities of the virtual world revealed themselves to me as I
was involved in the trouble-shooting of the eye-object in a way that dealing
with a digital camera or Final Cut Pro glitch has never done. It made me more creative. I shot some footage of the kino-eye,
messing around with different settings, first as a welcome pet/friend and then
as a pest who will not go away. I
also shot some footage for a fairy tale machinima, about Little Red L1, who
skips home with a basket of scripts she "borrows" from her teacher that she
doesn't understand and unleashes all kinds of sorcerer's apprentice havoc. I use the script in other objects,
including an art deco camera plane the designer Alexith Destiny built for me
that I use in inworld lectures to fly over the audience's heads, and I have
used the kino-eye in video podcasts critiquing virtual art for the Brooklyn Is
Watching project for added visual effect. Playing with the scripted eye
objects, "acting" with them, making this particular kind of animation reminded
me of the stop-motion animation of the film camera in Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, and I try to
emulate the playful tone the animated camera embodies. As much as his use of film techniques
and his demonstration of the kino-eye, that ludic sensibility (which also
informs the serious play so central to gaming and understanding how the various
levels of being both in and outside the 3-d environment intertwine) is one of
Vertov's major contribution to our ongoing exploration of new ways of seeing
and being, and how they are connected. My experience in learning enough about how a scripted object like my
kino-eye works, which took the form of play, took the step that Manovich lauds
Vertov for, and attempts to "merge database and narrative into a new form,"
(243) the active construction of virtual subjectivity through the kinetic
virtual kino-eye.

Although
Vertov did not see Second Life, it
was in Second Life that I heard French filmmaker Chris Marker say through his
avatar "Vertov was my teacher." In
many ways, it is not surprising that filmmaker Chris Marker, now 88, would make
his way into Second Life to extend some of his ideas about presence, time,
persona, memory, and permanence (and their opposites) that Erika Balsom
discussed in her essay on Marker's CD-ROMImmemory in a previous issue of e-Media Studies. Through his participation in the Chris
Marker museum http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ouvroir/186/66/40) , and also in Fiteiro
Cultural at Casa Millagrosa http://slurl.com/secondlife/Fiteiro%20Cultural/60/80/26 a project in which I am
also a contributing artist), Marker continues to take image-making and
story-telling into new directions with the newest forms of media.

Figure 3: L1 at the Chris Marker Museum

VIRTUAL SUBJECTIVITY

I have suggested that the virtual kino-eye is not only a tool for
machinima-making, but a significant way in which one "sees," in all senses of
the word, in a virtual world—virtual subjectivity. Beyond using a virtual world or game
platform as sets for machinima or to stage performances, the kinetic camera
possibilities of the virtual kino-eye are both the interface's "eyes" through
which the participant sees and experiences the virtual world and, more
significantly for thinking through the ramifications of virtual worlds, how
subjectivity is constructed.

The main question here is: what does it mean to say "I" in a virtual world? What does it mean to have a
first-person experience of feeling, perceiving, understanding, learning,
desiring, being repulsed by, and making meaning in a virtual world? What does it mean to be in a context in
which identity can be so self-consciously shaped and refined?

Subjectivity
can be defined as the experience of the "I," or, as Raymond Williams' phrase,
as "structures of feeling." It
encompasses a person's feelings, thoughts, and perceptions; it emphasizes their
individual encodings and decodings of their environment, social interactions,
and experiences. The term comes
from the French verb assujettir,
which has a double meaning of both to produce subjectivity and also to make
subject. It is both creative and
restrictive, and as the concept has taken root in different discourses within
the social sciences and the humanities, subjectivity has become like the ball
in a tennis match between these two sides of the same coin, to mix metaphors
freely. The way I am using
subjectivity explores a dialectical relationship between these two poles, and
includes ideas about identity, individuality, a person's sense of self and how
they make meaning, agency, and consciousness and emphasizes perceptions,
desires and interpretations. That
emphasis on internal reality means that the boundary between the self and the
world is blurred, and is constantly renegotiated.

So,
with that I mind, let's turn to thinking about subjectivity in the virtual
world of Second Life. If
subjectivity is the first-person experience of the "I," shaped by both
individual psychological experiences and wider cultural forces, and it is
intersubjective—created socially—then the people behind the avatars
certainly bring their actual world subjectivities in here. However, once inworld, instead of
having a body through which to experience the world—and as my theoretical
orientation tends towards phenomenology, I think this is important—we
have an avatar and visual and sound input that are not necessarily connected to
that avatar's position. There
are "mirror neurons"6 in the brain that respond to what the
avatar does, but it is different than direct sensory input. Therefore, the already blurry line
between the self and the world is completely smudged in virtual subjectivity.

Throughout
the rise of visual culture, physical point of view and subjectivity have been
connected. To some extent, all
visual representation explores this, and as each new visual medium arises, that
relationship is recreated and extended. In silent film, the development of continuity editing between expressive
camera shots created a narrative-based, emotionally grounded point of view
based on a fusion of physical, intellectual, and emotional perspectives. As scholars like Anne Friedberg,
Guiliana Bruno, and others have explored, the cinematic gaze is connected to
and informs other cultural practices, like consumerism, medical discourses, or
nationalism. Sound, color, digital
effects, and other technological developments in film and then television
reinforce and deepen this, but nothing is as significant as that leap initial
to the film spectator.

Until,
perhaps, now, with the new spectatorship/participatory gaze with the immersive
and interactive virtual world. Specifically, because of the way the viewing position is not by default
first-person, in a virtual world, the viewer position is both immersive and
detached, both connected intimately to our experience of the avatar—but
also strangely outside of him, her, or it. Instead of an "I," inworld we have an I/Eye through which we
create virtual subjectivity.

My
definition of "virtual
subjectivity" is: a mode of first-person
experience in a virtual world that is founded on a fusion of visual and
metaphoric point of view, shaped through "self-design" of the avatar
and environment, reinforced and extended through social interaction, known
through the avatar body's actions and movements in virtual space and place, and
enacted through virtual agency. Part of virtual subjectivity is the extent to which the mind/body
connection translates inworld experiences into embodied sensations that feel
"real." To sum up, there
are five major factors that contribute to virtual subjectivity:

1) virtual point of view

2) virtual self-design

3) virtual social relationships

4) virtual topophilia and

5) virtual agency

VIRTUAL POINT OF VIEW

Figure 4: Virtual POV -- The "eye" is also the
"I," but who knows if two people sharing the same virtual space are
seeing the same thing? (Screen
shots of Second Life by Lori Landay)

In a film, the spectator sees each
shot from the physical point of view of the camera chosen by the director and
the editor. This is cinematic
perspective, and is mostly in the third person, although of course there is a
powerful component of subjective emotional looking in the cinematic gaze and
occasionally, there is spectacularly good use of the first-person p.o.v. (think of the
steadicam shot in Goodfellas through
Henry Hill's eyes as he introduces us to some of the people in the bar). In the virtual world of Second Life,
however, the participant's default looking position is behind the avatar's
head, and follows the avatar, but it is not limited to that position. There are other possibilities—the
first-person mouse-look which mimics human sight and is locked to the avatar's
physical eye position, and a cam view that is unconnected to the avatar's body
and can zoom in and out, go around corners, and range far and wide. (See Machinima: Cam
Positions)

There are various ramifications to the
possibilities of the cam in Second Life. In a conversation, the artist DC Spensley, who is Dancoyote Antonelli in
Second Life, articulated some of those ramifications this way:

Radio is to TV like TV is to virtual
worlds. This is a real earth shaker, world changer in terms of the focus of the
viewer. In a TV or single perspective communal cinema situation, the view is
one way and from only one perspective, the director of the content dictates
what reality is and you consume that perspective passively. End of story. There
is no talk back, nor ability to change your view of the subject, peek back
stage or interact. . . . .

Virtual worlds are individual,
configurable experiences that empower a viewer to establish any POV they can
imagine. Instead of passive entertainment, the burden is now on the viewer to
participate in the creation of their own experience on a very basic level.

Spensley, who produces, choreographs,
and directs live "SkyDancer" performances in SL, with some seats that guide the
spectator's p.o.v. and some that don't, makes the key point that in a virtual
world, there has to be active viewing. The resident, or gamer, or participant makes a choice, even if it is to
use the default behind the avatar's head most of the time. As one clicks through different
animations, pose balls, rides in vehicles, learns to manipulate objects,
changing visual point of view becomes as much a part of moving through the
virtual world as walking, flying or teleporting. Some Second life theater performances manipulate the viewers
camera positions as if it were a film; the virtual adaptation of Fritz Lang's
1927 silent film Metropolis was
uncanny, both in its faithfulness to the silent film, and in being able to cam
around in the 3-d sets (slide show of the performance) here). When building inworld, the cam is essential. For an excellent machinima tutorial on
camera skills by NSS, including my favorite, how to break and enter, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LMcryDCIYk .

Figure 5: Screen shot of Metropolis performance in Second
Life

The various points of view that the participant in a virtual world
chooses, whether physical (avatar default, mouselook, camming
around, as shown in the machinima) or metaphoric (exploring a different identity through anonymity, role-play, alts,
gender-switching, being non-human) can be both tools for machinima--for digital
storytelling—or for storytelling and serious play within the virtual
world.

Moreover,
because in Second Life a person can choose what time of day, lighting
conditions, and levels of graphics settings, as well as the camera position,
although you might be next to an another avatar, there is no way of knowing
what that person is seeing. There
is not the same level of shared physical reality as in the actual world, even
though people participate in constructing reality for and with each other in
those moments when they do share virtual space. Further, what an avatar appears to be doing, or looking at,
may not be what the person behind the avatar is doing; within the virtual
world, the avatar could be carrying on various Instant message conversations
with avatars who are not present in the same virtual space, or could be
searching through their inventory, or buying something from the Linden
Labs-owned website Xstreet https://www.xstreetsl.com/,
or working in a program like Photoshop on something they will upload into
Second Life that will become part
of the virtual world, or simply away from the computer (afk) entirely. The virtual world is all illusion, and
what an avatar seems to be doing is part of that; creating virtual subjectivity
means a new kind of social construction of reality based on an even more
radically interpretative framework of assumptions, rife with new social faux
pas, misunderstandings, and humor.

Figure 6: Choosing the sunrise setting in Second Life at
Fiteiro Cultural at Casa Millagrosa. L1's installation in the background, right.

SELF-DESIGN

Actual world subjectivity encompasses our experience of our
bodies, gender, race, sexuality, age, appearance, and how we fit into cultural
ideals of beauty. In a virtual
world, however, there are hardly any limits on these aspects of appearance and
visual markers of identity. In
this image, you can see my experiment in what anthropologist Jason Pine calls
"self-design," my modification of my avatar over time; most recently, my avatar
is a centaur, which can be seen in Figure 6. I think of the avatar on a continuum of realism and
abstraction, in the way that Scott McCloud discusses his choice of
self-representation in Understanding
Comics:

In
the excellent video "An Emergent Second Life,"7 Pine discusses his concept of self-design of the avatar and the environment
with various SL participants. Hearing and seeing people talk about their relationship to their
avatars, and the choices they made, raise so many questions. Is it an extension of the
self-aestheticizing practices glorified in celebrity culture and beyond in
postmodern culture? Or is it
something else? What does it
suggest that avatars are so idealized, so much like the images seen in advertising
and the movies? That "skins" are
the inworld items people are willing to pay the most for, relative to other
virtual goods and services? Why be
human in a virtual world at all? Does the shape/look of the avatar shape the experience in the virtual
world? A project like Azdel
Slade's brave and compelling project "Becoming Dragon," (http://secondloop.wordpress.com/)
which explored how SL could be part of the preparation for transsexual surgery
by using the metaphoric transformations of a virtual world as ways of
understanding and extending transgendered experience, and indeed, there is a vibrant transgendered community in Second Life.

Figure 8: Self-Design of the Avatar -- L1 evolves over time
(counter-clockwise from right).

Self-design
extends beyond the avatar to being able to shape the environment, for those
residents who buy land and participate in the virtual world in that way,
too. Then the land, the structures
they choose to put on it, also become part of what shapes their subjectivity,
giving them a "home" in a world based on the metaphors of space and place. I joke that I love being able to
rearrange furniture in the virtual world without anyone else's help, but the
ability to customize and design one's environment without constraint is part of
the appeal of the virtual world. I'll return to this aspect of virtual subjectivity under the heading of
Virtual Topophilia.

VIRTUAL SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS

Nothing
makes a virtual space feel more "real" than when someone else is in it with
you. William Gibson imagined
cyberspace as a "consensual hallucination" in his novel Neuromancer in 1984 –and we create our senses of self in a
virtual world through our interactions with each other. Virtual identity is created and
maintained within a social framework—inworld, people validate each other's
existence and help make online identities and virtual lives more "real." There is also the element of cultural
norms, aesthetics, practices, behaviors, manners, language—all the things
of a culture—that contribute to virtual subjectivity. Subcultures and groups, whether
informal groups of friends or organized social networking groups, can be very
important in shaping an avatar's appearance, behavior, language, expectations,
and other aspects of virtual subjectivity. Subjectivity is really intersubjectivity, and there is a
whole new social construction of virtual reality, a plethora of them, in
fact.

Figure 9: "We create our senses of self in a virtual world
through our interactions with each other. It is social, and cultural, but it is done through computer-mediated
communication." (E-mail sent
to the data stream by L1 in V-TV, an installation in Second Life by Misprint
Thursday.)

However,
the ways in which people make, maintain, and experience those relationships is
crucial, however, because it is through computer-mediated communication.
Computer mediated communication (CMC) researcher Joseph B. Walther describes a
kind of text chat that is "hyperpersonal" and allows for selective
self-presentation in a way that face to face communication does not.
Although Walther is not specifically discussing SL communication, his research
is highly applicable to how we form and maintain social relationships in a
virtual world. Computer-mediated communication like the text-based instant
messaging and local chat which is still the prevalent mode of communication in
Second Life despite the availability of voice, has several factors which foster
a more idealized self-presentation than face to face communication. In
his essay, "Selective self-presentation in computer-mediated communication:
Hyperpersonal dimensions of technology, language, and cognition," Walther
describes four ways people use CMC to manage impressions and enhance
their message:

-
it is editable,

-
it is possible to spend more time on a typed communication than on an utterance
of speech, even in a concurrent text chat

-
it is removed from non-verbal cues that might undercut the language that is
chosen, and

-
it allows for a reallocation of resources from the kinds of decodings that come
into play in face to face communication8

There
is a feedback loop involved as well, because the two people involved in the
conversation who are shaping their online or inworld friendship with CMC are
both creating a persona in SL through the self-design of an avatar, and each is
decoding the text messages, shaped through the affordances of CMC, in a low-cue
environment, so that they are interpreting the already carefully crafted
self-presentation how they want to see it. This is a powerful filter, or
magnifying process.

The
hyperpersonal communication feedback loop also plays into the element of
control that is a strong factor in the appeal of virtual worlds—this
connects with virtual agency, below. Although almost everything can be shaped and customized infinitely in
SL, that does not include the other people, but sometimes I think that the mode
of communication, and the polite discourse that has evolved culturally in that
virtual world, leads people to hear only what they want to hear, until there is
enough dissonance that their illusion is finally broken, and there can be a
shock when one realizes the gap between points of view, most caused by
misunderstandings. Inworld social
relationships can veer into what people term "drama" at these moments of
conflict, of incompatible expectations and perceptions. One kind of conflict I have experienced
is about availability and access in the virtual world. I am often online but working within SL
capturing video or working on virtual art installations, and have had two
people who are in SL for purely social reasons remove me from their friends'
lists angrily because I did not have time to talk with them as I approached a
deadline, even though I explained what I was doing. (When I wrote that last sentence,
I started to write "even though they knew what I was doing," but when I think
about it, I don't know what they knew, just what I think they knew, so mired am
I in my own virtual point of view; this is analogous to the actual world of
course, but exacerbated by computer mediated communication, and one could also
say that I did not have enough shared virtual world view with the people who
defriended me in this example anyway.) 9

Nevertheless,
friendships evolve and genuine understanding and knowledge of another can
develop, either within the virtual world exclusively or by moving between SL
forms of communication and extra-world media like email (pseudonymous and
actual world addresses), instant messaging, video chat, telephone, and in
person meetings. Whether actual
names and locations are revealed or not, people mix the actual and the virtual
in their friendships, trading details from their lives, with reality as the
currency used to build trust. This
progression is not radically different from getting to know someone in
face-to-face situations, when often you don't know their names, or full names,
or where they live, or what they do. 10

Another
factor in virtual social relationships is being able to choose the level of
what Pathfinder Linden (Jon Lester) calls "emotional bandwidth," the
amount of emotional information that different kinds of communication, like
instant messaging, text chat inworld between avatars who are in the same
virtual space, emails, voice chat, video chat, or face to face interaction. In person, face-to-face communication
has the widest pipeline, to use Pathfinder's metaphor, and asynchronous text
has the smallest. Some people are
very skilled at squeezing a lot of information and inflection through the
smaller pipeline; like poets or minimalist artists, they prefer the lower
bandwidth medium for aesthetic or other reasons. Text chat has a lower, or
smaller, pipeline and although the typing can become tedious, it is an easier
form of communication in many ways. In my personal experiences on
sabbatical in SL, I found many talented and engaging writers with whom to
interact in text conversation, and although I do use voice sometimes, it still
seems like the natural form of communication in that virtual world. If I know about who the avatar is in
the actual world, I "toggle" between the two images and identities, often so
quickly that they fuse; I made a video about this phenomenon which is published
on PBS Frontline's Digital Nation
website: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/participate/?p=492 .

Therefore,
although the ways in which virtual social relationships take on a specific
manifestation in the virtual world, it is only when we say "I" to another, and
are acknowledged, whether in text or voice, by them, and acknowledge them, in
the synchronous interactions that transcend space and time zone differences,
that virtual subjectivity takes shape.

VIRTUAL TOPOPHILIA

Topophilia
is the love of the environment, and in a virtual world, one's perception,
values, attitudes, and experiences of space and place (to borrow terminology
from anthropologist Yi-Fu Tuan) are a large part of how a person constructs
their subjectivity. It is true
that everyone has to be someplace, but the choice of where that is in a virtual
world is almost limitless, and someone could build a space to their
specifications if something did not already exist. Almost any kind of landscape is available in Second Life:
beach, urban, space, pastoral, forest, deserts, mountains, underwater. Tuan argues that "When space becomes
thoroughly familiar to us, it has become place" (Space and Place, 73). People develop strong relationships to specific places, despite the
ephemeral nature of the virtual world, and express dismay when places
disappear, as they often do, because owners have decided not to keep them, for
whatever reason. Having
experiences and memories in virtual places strengthens the sense of self in the
virtual world.11

More
than just a dream or a daydream, being in a virtual world as an avatar means
interacting with a graphical representation of space; it means redefining
spatial experience. In a virtual
world like Second Life, without haptic input, it is the imagination, the
development of identification with the avatar and a mind-body connection that
makes physical experiences seem "real." The experience of telepresence, of not just viewing through the
spectatorial perspective of a kino-eye (virtual or cinematic), but experiencing
through it so much so that the location of the actual body is no longer the
only input of experience, means overcoming distance and redefining what it
means to be.

In
a virtual world, there is a wide range of interaction with place, varying from
the mastery of the self-design of the environment discussed above to the sudden
lack of control that can happen over the avatar's body and environment. New media theorist and pracitioner
Ellen Strain distinguishes between "representational realism" and "experiential
realism" with sight as the primary sensory input with the former and
multisensory input for the latter; although the visual is clearly the primary
field of data in a virtual world, it is not the only one, and depending on how
one experiences the social, physical, auditory, and mobile aspects of the
virtual world, the other kinds of input could become just as important. In an unfamiliar space, or in a space
with a lot of lag, it can be difficult to move, to control one's avatar. If the visuals are slow to "rezz," to resolve
on the screen, then one's experience is of being unable to see who or what is
around, unable to know where to go or how to move effectively. As people "explore" new sims and
builds either through searching, looking in other avatars' profile picks, by
joining groups that send out notices about interesting places, reading blogs,
trading landmarks with friends, or wandering/flying around as virtual
flaneurs/flaneuses, not quite the data cowboys imagined by William Gibson (and
held up by Manovich as the database flaneurs of the future), but engaged in
journeying and making narratives of their virtual experiences through their
uses of the virtual kino-eye. Perhaps as they go into unfamiliar virtual terrain, they may even take
what we could term a kind of "tourist gaze," which Strain defines as "characterized by the constant push and
pull of distanced immersion, by the desire to be fully immersed in an
environment yet literally or figuratively distanced from the scene in order to
occupy a comfortable viewing position" (27). It is interesting to consider the
possibilities of familiar and unfamiliar, home and abroad, in a virtual world.

For now, the mobile avatar and even more
mobile kinetic kino-eye through which a person experiences virtual space and
place is physically housed in an immobile body, in front of a computer and
screen, but that is fast changing, as more applications are available on mobile
devices, and as more kinds of haptic input devices develop.12 Moreover, some studies show a positive
correlation between avatar activity and increased fitness activity, or people's
ability to master a physical task in the actual world after experiencing it or
simulating it in a virtual context.13

As
a final note on how the experience of virtual space and place shapes virtual
subjectivity, Tuan comments that "Distance is distance from self" (47), but in
a virtual world, notions of distance—and self—are less well
defined. If visual point of view
is no longer tied to the body's eyes, but liberated in the kinetic virtual
kino-eye, and if the avatar body can teleport from point to point in an
instant, distance from self can be erased in a blink, or a click. And if the self is both sitting at the computer—or
moving around and logged in on a mobile device, using various kinds of input
that might be more physical than a mouse—and kinetic in the virtual world,
interacting with people virtually from around the world, what is distance?

Figure 11: A moonlit night at the Monkey Cove sims in Second Life.

VIRTUAL AGENCY

Agency is the capacity to act in the
world, to effect it. Participants
have a high degree of agency in SL; artists and builders are particularly
interested in Second Life over other virtual worlds because all the content is
created by the residents, and they can build things with the inworld tools as
well as use software outside of SL and upload textures, sculpted prim maps,
sounds, and animations. Creative
people who are not interested in building or making art per se can still
self-design their avatars and environments, buying the creations of others,
enacting a postmodern bricolage of identity making that can change as much and
often as they want to. People can
participate in groups that are organized around just about any activity or
interest imaginable, and if a group did not exist, a person could start
one. Whether one thinks of it as
creativity, design, consumption, or participation, the specific platform of
Second life affords people a high degree of control over their environment and
activities.

Depending on what activities
participants are engaged in, they are going to have very different first-person
experiences of what it means to be an "I." If a person comes into Second Life and spends most of
their time in role play games, then SL will feel like a MMPORPG (massively
multiplayer online role playing game). If they go into SL to "perform" live music by streaming themselves
playing music while their avatar does animations in venues while other avatars
listen and dance (and possibly tip inworld, buy CDs online, or go to
performances in the actual world), then SL will be a virtual venue, with its
own technical, economic, and artistic benefits and challenges, with a very
different experience from someone whose avatar surfs, whether as part of one of
the competitive surfing groups, or just for fun at one of the gorgeous SL
beaches. Some people are in SL for
social reasons, others for professional ones. People come in for one reason, and find others, as they
learn new skills and can participate in the virtual world in ways they didn't
expect, and there are various issues around the increasing use of SL for
professional reasons, including conflict around pseudonymity, the use of
alternative accounts, and the possibility of dress codes for avatars (http://www.thestandard.com/news/2009/10/09/gartner-rise-virtual-worlds-will-lead-dress-codes-avatars).
The ability to create content in the specific platform and interface of Second
Life is what draws so many artists to that virtual world and not others.

What it means to say "I" in the
virtual world, how closely related the avatar self is to the actual self, is
connected to what the person is doing there in the virtual world. For me as a teacher and an artist, I
want my avatar L1Aura Loire to be similar to me, both in appearance and in
persona. For others, the appeal of
the virtual world is the difference between the virtual self and the actual
self. There is no unified Second
Life experience, not only because of the individualized nature of virtual
subjectivity, with each person choosing his or her own virtual point of view
and expressing themselves through the choices of self-design, but also because
there is no central experience other than navigating the virtual space with an
avatar, and using some form of communication with others (or choosing not
to).

Virtual art is a particularly
interesting aspect of Second Life, in part because it often self-consciously
and self-reflexively comments on the experience of being in the virtual
world. There are as many
different kinds of virtual art as there are kinds of actual world art, ranging
from uploaded 2D images "hung" on gallery walls (which I think of more as
virtual exhibition than virtual art), to immersive and interactive
installations that use the some or all of the full array of SL: sound, avatar
animations and movement, the SL physics engine, video, particles, scripted
objects, as well as textures, sculpted prims, and other objects. My own virtual art installations
tend to explore ideas that I am also thinking about in my research, and I am
trying to experiment with new forms for doing that at the same time that I
create pieces that immerse the avatar within an interactive environment,
playing with a paradox of closeness and distance, of aura and simulation. (See the machinima "The Future of
Virtual Subjectivity at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPfwQGQHkMo and inworld at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Fiteiro%20Cultural/103/55/21 .)

There is also a virtual art scene,
with many groups, large and small, devoted to making, sharing, and celebrating
the astonishing creativity and talent of SL residents. There are opening parties for
individual and group shows with dancing to live music streamed inworld, sneak
previews for groups, prizes, exclusive group shows, practitioners of similar
kinds of art gravitating towards each other and developing theories and
methods, galleries, collaborations, patronage, and other aspects of the actual
world art worlds.

Among the many art collectives and
groups, one project in particular caught my attention, in equal parts for its
good art, experimentation, democratic impulse, mixture of theory and practice,
and not least because of its ludic spirit. Brooklyn Is Watching (http://brooklyniswatching.com),
and in SL at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Push/72/45/22
has a sim (land in SL) where people
can build art installations and others can critique it, in podcasts that are
posted on the web and in itunes, and in blog postings. It is a democratic project, in that
anyone can build there, and encourages conversation about virtual art. There is also a 52-inch screen in an
art gallery in Brooklyn, NY, Jack the Pelican Presents "http://www.jackthepelicanpresents.com/") that has an avatar, Monet Destiny,
logged into SL on the BIW sim. This project fosters virtual agency in providing a space for artists to
build, a place for people to build communicate across the actual/virtual
boundary, and a bridge to real world critique. As a mixed reality project, it makes the screen that shows
SL in Jack the Pelican Presents into a 2-way window, into a portal, that
prefigures a future in which we will move between virtual and actual realities,
heightening our agency in each, as technology develops that facilitates mixed
reality, or augmented reality in art, commerce, education, and other arenas. It creates community, both in the
virtual and actual worlds, and the events around the Year One celebration in
summer 2009, including a panel discussion that I was on in the gallery, as well
as many events inworld, brought people together and called our attention to the
variety and kinds of virtual art being made. BIW is in transition, after the focus on the Best of
Year One Festival over the summer and recent moves from a corporate sim to the
Kansas University Art Department's sim, and then to a sim generously provided
by Soup and Lovers Lane Studios (see: http://soup-spoon.blogspot.com/). I hope that the artists whose work has
exemplified the best and most innovative art in SL will continue to plop their
pieces down next to each other, where we can see and talk about them.

Figure 12: Brooklyn is Watching

CONCLUSION

I also have a glimpse of a kind of
virtual subjectivity that I would associate with the
trickster—shapeshifter, crosser of boundaries, culture hero or heroine
who embodies and enacts central cultural conflicts—a virtual subjectivity
that would reveal all of the virtual world as installation space and oneself as
a performance artist within it, calling our attention to the boundaries between
the physical and virtual worlds by finding new ways of crossing them, looping
between them, shifting the borders, again and again. This is a ludic subjectivity, constructed through the
virtual kino-eye, engaged in the serious play of remaking the potential in all
possible realities, and I would like to end this piece with my machinima "The
Falling Woman Story," which explores that perspective. Falling in Second Life, perceived
either from a first-person perspective or from afar with the kino-eye, is one
of the fascinations for me in the virtual world. I have my avatar fall from great heights often. At first, it made me queasy--the
whole fear of falling thing made manifest. But soon I understood that L1 couldn't get hurt, and I
started to like it. I fall
whenever I can. I like the
way the dresses move on the descent. I like the feeling of letting go. I like the animation that plays
when she gets up and dusts herself off afterwards. No harm done. If the future brings augmented reality,
or mixed reality, in which we "toggle" or combine the actual and the virtual,
whether imaginatively or through haptics, a ludic subjectivity that embraces
falling, that finds fun in our fear of falling, that constructs the experience
of the betwixt and between of falling through the virtual kino-eye, will
further our explorations in this new frontier. (See Machinima: Falling Woman Story.)

About the Author

Lori Landay, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Berklee College
of Music, is an interdisciplinary scholar and new media artist exploring the
making of visual meaning in twentieth- and twenty first-century American
culture. She is the author of Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con
Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture, articles on virtual
worlds, digital narrative, silent film, I Love Lucy, and other topics,
and the forthcoming book, I Love Lucy. Her creative work includes
machinima, virtual art installations, creative documentary, digital video, web
design, and music video. She is also Aura Loire in the virtual
world Second Life.

The research for
this Working Theory piece was supported by a Newbury Comics Faculty Fellowship
at Berklee College of Music for the project "Virtual Worlds," part of
Lori Landay's 2008-09 sabbatical project.

Consider a virtual
guest lecture/tour of Second Life by L1Aura Loire for your media studies or
other class. Contact llanday@berklee.edu for details.

4 I've found
lack of facial expressions to be the most difficult hurdle in making a
screwball comedy that takes place within the world of Second Life. On the one hand, in my homage to
Bringing Up Baby, I'm free to use an
animated pink leopard avatar as a character, but the human characters are much
more limited than live actors. In
most of my machinima, I played all the characters myself, but for this one, I
worked with other people, and that made the process both more interesting and
more complicated. See the trailer
here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb8hlpxVejE

5 I often use the
SpaceNavigator by 3Dconnexion instead of the mouse as a kind of joystick
controller, which can give a steadicam kind of floatiness to a shot.

9 The
interface of Second Life has many tools that mediate social interactions. The friends' list is a whole new social tool,
with varying meanings around what friendship means in social media, the
protocols of offering or refusing friendship, what it means to "see" that
someone is online, what expectations and responsibilities that
involves—whether it is like sitting on the front stoop or front porch, or
it is like having a phone with voicemail). Although a person cannot control other people in a virtual
world, they can "defriend" someone, or "hide" so an individual can't see that
they are online. A person can even
be "muted" so nothing that they communicate will be received, and they would
never know that they have been muted. Or a person can choose to allow a friend to see where they are inworld
on the map. An interesting example
of a subculture using the interface creatively are people involved in dominance
and submission relationships that use a modified viewer named Restricted Life
so that "masters" can limit what a "sub" can see and do, making that metaphor
manifest in the virtual world. All
of these tactics of access speak to the issue of control in an environment that
offers so much control in terms of self-design, point of view, the environment,
activities—everything, except for the other people.

10 The analogy
of people whom you get to know in a specific context, like at a gym, springs to
mind. In their workout gear, they
are akin to an avatar, and maybe are not recognizable on the street. You might know their first names, and
some things about them, and that forms the basis of your conversation. You know they will be there at the same
time as you, and you might miss them or worry about them if they didn't show up
for a while. Maybe you decide to
get to know someone better, beyond the casual context, and learn more about
that person, and the friendship extends beyond the boundaries of the gym. But if it doesn't, or if that
friendship doesn't develop into a meaningful, deep interaction, or if you find
you don't have anything much in common, there is nothing intrinsically wrong
with the gym, or with getting to know people at a gym.

11 There is a function in the viewer for Teleport Home, and a way to
set a certain place as Home, but a "resident" has to either own the land or be
part of a group that allows them that permission. "Home" and certain relationships and privileges to virtual
land are intertwined with paid membership, paid rental, the generosity of
others, or purchased land ownership.